---
title: "The 26 Principles, Revisited — #3: Ambiguity Tolerance — What I Said, and What’s Actually Happening"
canonical: https://jimcarroll.com/2026/09/the-26-principles-revisited-3-ambiguity-tolerance-what-i-said-and-whats-actually-happening/
updated: 2026-09-22T17:06:40+00:00
---

# The 26 Principles, Revisited — #3: Ambiguity Tolerance — What I Said, and What’s Actually Happening

*Part of my “26 Principles, Revisited” series — checking my own math, nine months into the year I predicted.*

*Don’t try to be certain, be decisive.*

![](https://jimcarroll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/2026-3-AmbiguityTolerance.jpg)

Day 3 argued that waiting for clarity in energy, manufacturing, and healthcare AI decisions is a losing move — the speed of change now outpaces the speed of data collection, so the discipline is deciding with 70% of the information, not 100%.

Nine months later, the specific dilemmas I named — gigawatt power bets, humanoid-robot-versus-buy-now manufacturing calls, AI-diagnostic liability in healthcare — are all still unresolved. If anything, a new layer of ambiguity got added on top: is a given AI investment one of the ones that pays off, or one of the ones that gets quietly defunded? Waiting for a clean business case before acting has itself become the riskier bet, not the safer one.

**Verdict: Held up — 2026 just added a second, harder decision on top of the first one.**

*Next up: Principle #4, Anticipatory Intelligence — revisited.*